Farming?

So, the harvest festival was pathetic. Pilgrim's Bounty more than makes up for it. I was busy with real life stuff until the last few days of this festival so just used it as an opportunity to level up cooking skill on all my main alts. Each of them are now at around 300 skill thanks to a single run of the dailies and associated cooking recipies. This one event has improved the tradeskills of my little army more than I have in the last year of mucking about!

The Pilgrim's Paunch achievement made me chuckle. Aside from the obvious greed stuffing your face at each cities' tables, nearly every recipe for these foods contained lots of honey. Very likely you WOULD become obese eating that much sweet and fatty food!


I've spent a fair bit of time recently playing Aion. My guys are all still relatively low level so haven't yet experienced the massive grind that others have complained about. Since I don't really care about levelling, a long grind for each level wont affect me much so long as there are still things to amuse myself along the way.
Tradeskills are one area thats annoying me though. Its a horrid time and money sink with little to show for it as yet. Standard crafted items are generally as good or slightly better than drops at the same level, and the rare special items are significantly better but the process to get there is hideously expensive. Crafting also involves a lot of different materials. Just the basic stuff I'm doing at the moment has mostly filled my limited bag space. Its much worse in this respect than the crafting in WoW.

Many of the people who started blogging about Aion at or before release seem to have dropped out, even though the game is barely 2 months old in the west. It hasn't grabbed my attention the way WoW did but so far is significantly better than the free-to-play games I listed in my earlier post. I've actually found that playing Aion has revitalised my Wow experience. At this stage I'm enjoying both!

Ravasaur!

My three highest Horde characters have recently been working on their Ravasaur mounts. Here is a selection of screenshots.

First, Cryptography, a rogue, is considering a career change to hunter.


My Ravasaur pet was about 16 at the time. He grows a little more!



That shot was taken just before handing in the final quest. He's now a mount as shown below. My friend Nybor is there as well with her very young hatchling for comparison.




Kytlin is an orc hunter. She came across a heart-rending scene in Ungoro:



Two orphaned Ravasaurs standing by the corpses of their parents crying piteously. Bite marks on the adults probably came from one of the giant T-rexes that patrol the crater. Kytlin enticed the twin ravasaurs with tidbits of food then took them to Tanaris for a proper feed.



Bug Eggs are great for the growing Dino! They also wanted slabs of dinosaur flesh and crunchy bits from the silithids in Un'goro. They even wanted to dress up like the adult raptors and demanded feathers from the biggest birds in the area, Tanaris Searing Rocs. Some time later, they traveled to the goblin city of Gadgetzan.



Cryptoknight, an undead Deathknight also has a ravasaur pet but he's camera shy. All ravasaurs are now on day 20 and can be handed in for the mount training. A 20-day grind for each but well worth it. I just wish we could keep the pet as well as the mount!